Take a look at entertainment and life in general from Jess's perspective.

Jess Phelps is a designer for the Daily Siftings Herald. She attended Lyon College in Batesville, Ark., majoring in theatre, where she stage managed four productions, all of which won awards at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. A lifelong Arkadelphia resident, Jess's favorite pastimes are reading, painting, playing video games, and listening to music. She hates spiders, bratwurst, and the History Channel.

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July 18, 2013
12:01 a.m.

The Call

Halle Berry, Abigail Breslin

Rated R

To call this movie a thriller would be a gross understatement. The Call literally had my heart pounding for a good two-thirds of the screentime. The movie follows 9-1-1 operator Jordan Turner (Berry), who’s very good at her job but who finds herself unable to continue fielding calls after she inadvertently gives away the location of a young caller to the man who’s broken into her home, resulting in the girl’s death. Some months later, Jordan has become a 9-1-1 trainer, teaching other people how to take emergency calls. At the same time, teenager Casey Welson (Breslin) has been kidnapped from a mall and stuffed in the trunk of a car, and called 9-1-1 from a Tracfone hidden in her back pocket. A trainee operator receives the call but can’t handle it, so Jordan steps in.

This movie takes off like a rocket and just doesn’t stop. The world inside the “hive” of the 9-1-1 call center crackles with tense emotions. Jordan really didn’t see herself ever fielding an emergency call again, and now here she is serving as the only link Casey has to anyone who could help her. Jordan’s supervisor told her before to never promise a caller anything, because operators have no way of keeping those promises, but Jordan can’t stop herself from promising Casey that she isn’t going to die, and that just pulls the audience further into the situation.

All the truly vein-throbbing action of the movie comes from the scenes that take place with Casey in the trunk of the car. You feel her desperation, her hope, and her helplessness as you fight with her to be seen or heard by any friendly stranger before the kidnapper gets to his destination. Jordan helps her break out a taillight and get noticed, but the man behind the wheel is just as determined to carry out his sinister plan. It’s the kind of action that will have you cheering Casey on aloud as she fights and openly cursing when the kidnapper throws a new wrench in the gears.

Something unusual about this movie is that both leads are women. If you’ve seen a movie in the last ever, you’ll notice that that almost never happens. Co-screenwriter Richard D’Ovidio said having strong female leads “was appropriate here, since most 911 call operators are women.” Movies with female leads have a bad reputation for being soft movies, with no real hard thought or meat to the story at all, but that is not true here. The Call is an edge-of-your-seat action thriller that will literally have your heart pounding out of your chest. Not recommended for those with high blood pressure; highly recommended for everyone else.